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94 Chapter 2
the Church’s rules on the forbidden degrees of kinship. There
may be various explanations, but one could be precisely that they
had worked out a way of making the Church’s own law work against
itself. They played the ‘forbidden degree’ rules o· against the indissolubility
rules. If a king or nobleman married a woman related
within the extensive forbidden degrees of consanguinity or anity,
and did not seek a dispensation, he had an annulment in his pocket.
John Baldwin found a remarkable passage in the writings of Peter
the Chanter: a knight saying explicitly that he was going to marry
a particular woman with a large dowry who was possibly related to
him in the third degree of anity, and that if she didn’t please him
he would be able to get the marriage dissolved. It would be valid
in church law: a church court would have to recognize it. This may
explain why the laity so readily accepted church jurisdiction over
marriage cases.
Between the tenth century and the twelfth we find what the foregoing
would lead us to expect: the rise of ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
roughly coinciding with a decline in observance of ‘forbidden de-
Cf. Bouchard, ‘Eleanor’s Divorce from Louis VII’, 225, speaking of the dissolution
of Louis VII’s marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine: ‘this divorce, a case of a
prominent couple breaking up on the grounds of consanguinity with the divorce the
husband’s idea, not the bishops’, was not typical of the entire Middle Ages, only of
the twelfth century’.
‘Sicut audivit magister militem quemdem [recte quemdam?] de uxore ducenda
dicentem: Bene est michi quia magna est dos. In tercio genere anitatis forsitan
est illa mihi, et ideo non ita mihi proxima, quod ab ea separer. Sed si voluero et
non placebit michi, per anitatem illam discidium procurare potero. Ecce quanta
derisio in ecclesia propter huiusmodi tradiciones’ (quoted by J. W. Baldwin, Masters,
Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle (2 vols.;
Princeton, 1970), ii. 225 n. 179, and analysis at i. 335).
‘Mesurons le chemin parcouru, en trente ans: en 1031, au concile de Bourges, le
juge d’ ‹Eglise n’est pas mentionn‹e lorsqu’est admis le divorce pour cause d’adult›ere;
en 1060, au contraire, le concile de Tours investit l’‹ev^eque d’un pouvoir d’appr‹eciation
pratiquement sans limite, dans tous les cas de divorce et de s‹eparation’ (Daudet,
L’ ‹Etablissement de la comp‹etence de l’‹eglise, 43); ‘A l’‹epoque d’Yves de Chartres, non
seulement l’‹ev^eque est pleinement comp‹etent, pour faire cesser une s‹eparation non
canoniquement motiv‹ee et, ›a l’inverse, pour s‹eparer un mariage ou m^eme pour le
d‹eclarer nul, mais encore la fermet‹e des lignes g‹en‹erales de la proc‹edure suivie
devant lui d‹enote d‹ej›a une pratique bien assise. Cette comp‹etence pleine est aussi
une comp‹etence exclusive. Apr›es plus d’un si›ecledegraved‹ecadence doctrinale et
judiciaire, l’‹episcopat franc«aisar‹eclam‹e, en 1031, cette comp‹etence; trente ans apr›es
il l’a pos‹ee comme une r›egle. Et si, durant la fin du xiE si›ecle, certain fid›eles ont pu
tenter de se soustraire ›alaloicanonique,gr^ace ›a la force de leur situation personnelle,
ils se sont finalement inclin‹es: les r‹epudiations arbitraires sont impossible d‹esormais,
en droit sinon en fait’ (ibid. 68).